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Perspective

Actualité en histoire de l'art

1 | 2015

Varia

Conceptions and reworkings of baroque and

neobaroque in recent years Conceptions et déterminations récentes du baroque et du néobaroque

Claire

Farago,

Helen

Hills,

Monika

Kaup,

Gabriela

Siracusano,

Jens

Baumgarten

and

Stefano

Jacoviello

Translator:

Susan Wise

Electronic

version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/perspective/5792

DOI: 10.4000/perspective.5792

ISSN: 2269-7721

Publisher

Institut national d'histoire de l'art

Printed

version

Date of publication: 31 July 2015

Number of pages: 43-62

ISBN: 978-2-917902-26-4

ISSN: 1777-7852

Electronic

reference Claire Farago, Helen Hills, Monika Kaup, Gabriela Siracusano, Jens Baumgarten and Stefano

Jacoviello, "

Conceptions and reworkings of baroque and neobaroque in recent years

Perspective

[Online], 1

2015, Online since 31 January 2017, connection on 01 October 2020. URL

: http:// ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/perspective.5792

43Débats

Baroque needs to be thought across chronological and geographical divides to con nect architecture and dance, painting and natural science, philosophy, sculpture and music (and not in the sense of representations of music) and, above al l, in relation to encounters with difference - heavenly, earthly, social, political, religious, geograph ical. What possibilities in baroque are open now in relation to present dilemmas in art history and world events?

Baroque enables - arguably, it

demands - a radical rethinking of historical time - and a rethinking of familiar history. It permits a liberation from periodization and linear time, as well as from historicism. While the scholars below acknowledge that baroque is often equated with style or historical period, it is most productively thought beyond them. Mieke Bal has argued that baroque epistemology permits an "hallucinat ory quality" of relation between past and present that also allows a release from a supposed academic objectivity, while insisting that the engagement with the past should remain discom fiting and profoundly disturbing. 1 Instead of repressing the past and time, creative retro spection allows its implications to emerge. In its materiality and bodiliness, ba roque undermines resolution, gropes towards fragmentation, overgrows, and exceeds. Baroque architecture may be seen as overflowing, an excess of ornamental exteriority and ev asive proliferation. This brings to the fore the question of surface. Andrew Benjamin's approach to surface as neither merely structural nor merely decoration in architecture is impor tant here. Baroque time and form impinge on each other - that is, not simply the time that it takes to process point of view into form, but of form into point of view. 2

Thus the pursuit is for a baroque

vision of vision, a baroque audition of hearing, and a multitemporality. The question of materiality (not mere matter, materials, or technique) must also come into play. (broadly, the sixteenth century), even as he identifies formal characteristic s that may exceed that periodization, Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze in particular permit baroque to free itself from such an anchor. 3 Irlemar Chiampi writes: "The Baroque, with its historical and geograp hical, not to mention aesthetic, eccentricity, confronts the historicist canon (the new 'classicism') constructed in the hegemonic centers of the W estern world, thereby functioning to rede fine the terms according to which Latin America enters into the orbit of Euro-American modernity. The Baroque, crossroads of signs and temporalities, aesthetic logic of mourn- ing and melancholy, luxuriousnesss and pleasure, erotic convulsion and allegorical pathos, reappears to bear witness to the crisis or end of modernity and to the very condi tion of a continent that could not be assimilated by the project of the

Enlightenment." 4

Claire Farago

is Professor of

Renaissance art, theory, and

criticism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Her publications include

Art Is Not

What You Think It Is

(2012).

Helen Hills

is Professor of

Art History at the University

of York. She has published extensively on baroque art and architecture and is completing a monograph on miracles and baroque materiality.

Monika Kaup

is Professor in

English and adjunct Professor

in Comparative Literature at the

University of Washington. Her

projects include

Neobaroque

in the Americas (2012).

Gabriela Siracusano

is a resear- cher for the CONICET, professor of art history, and director of the

Centro de Investigación en Arte,

Materia y Cultura (Universidad

Nacional de Tres de Febrero).

Jens Baumgarten

is Professor of Art History at the Universi dade Federal de São Paulo and a researcher at the Conselho

Nacional de Desenvolvimento

Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq).

Stefano Jacoviello

teaches

Semiotics of Culture and His-

tory of Music at the Univer- sity of Siena. He is involved as scientific coordinator in several international research projects on performing heritage.Conceptions and reworkings of baroque and neobaroque in recent years A discussion moderated by Helen Hills with Jens Baumgarten, Claire Farago, Stefano Jacoviello, Monika Kaup, and Gabriela Siracusano

441 | 2015PERSPECTIVE

Varia

Yet "baroque as Counter-Reformation" already

too hastily elides baroque and Counter-Reformation. Certainly, this has been the dominant model within European scholarship on European baroque. But it is a perennial cliché, endlessly reiterated but rarely criti cally examined. In the great churches of Pallavicino in Bologna the cry of the Counter-Reformation resounds. But this is far from the situation in Naples or Sicily where the greatest adventures of the baroque take place (figs. 1-2). Baroque is far more than a first response to the spiritual crisis of the Reformation. Hostilities to Muslims, Moriscos and Jews arguably have as much pur- chase as anti-Protestantism.

Arguably, the deficiencies of "baroque as

Counter-Reformation" come most sharply to light, less within most studies of the Old World than in relation to their implications in the "New." While the limiting effects outside Old Europe of what is, after all, a representational (and reactionary) mode of conceptualizing baroque within Europe become more readily and horribl y appar- ent outside Europe, this does not mean that this is a problem to be addressed only outside of Europe. Far from it. It is vital to recall that the Spanish monarchy took advantage of baroque for its imperializing projects within

Europe, as well as beyond

it. Thus while scholarship that looks beyond Europe is urgently required , the Europe/ non-Europe paradigm is unhelpful in thinking about baroque's effects and impulses. A rethinking of the paradigms of baroque and of the so-called "Counte r-Reformation" within Europe is thus urgently required. Indeed, arguably, it is precisely here that new paradigms are most urgently needed. This should send us back to "

Old Europe"

as much as to Latin America - with a desire to re- exa mine, this time far more criti- cally, precisely those most familiar and outworn Old European paradigms. Might scholarship of baroque in Latin America usefully be redeployed in re- lation to European baroque? "Why is Latin America the chosen territor y of the ba roque?" asks Alejo Carpentier, "Because all symbiosis, all mestizaje , engenders the baroque." 5 How might baroque Europe be thought in terms of mestizaje? Does ba- roque exhalt in the ineradicable character of antagonism? If New World baroque emerges as more than a faithful imitation of the colonial model, more than simply a "top down" imposition by colonialists, but something new, original, a rebellious affirmation of a nascent mestizo American cul ture, generated through the minoritization of a colonial model at the ha nds of the subjected users who were forced to inhabit it, then what are the im plications of this for Spanish colonized Flanders or Italy? How might the potential that baroque offers in relation to history - including history of art, music, literature - and conceptions of the past be best seized? In what ways might baroque decenter familiar narratives of the "long seventeenth century"? Part of baroque's greatest potential is in terms of historical time. History is too readily mobilized for political ends. Resisting periodization assists in thwarting simple historicism. Instead of subjecting time to chronology, Walter Benjamin's allegorical way of seeing grasps the constellation which one era has formed with an earlier one, opening a possibility of resistance to the catastrophe of modernity. Deleuze's theory of the baroque fold, in contrast, investigates the baroque as a c reative

1. Church of Santa

Caterina, Palermo.

2. Lorenzo Vaccaro (attrib.),

St. Mary of Egypt

, silver reliquary, Naples, Chapel of the Treasury of San Gennaro.

Baroque and neobaroque

45Débats

principle. 6 Together they demonstrate baroque's rich potential. Baroque as a non- objectivist mode might explore slippages between appearance and truth, d eception and insight. On the other hand, it might reiterate these tropes precisely as a means to halt a rethinking of history and thus also of an opening of a different futur e. One needs only to consider the usefulness of baroque to the absolutists. It is, ra ther, the untapped possibilities within baroque that can now be engaged. But must baroque inevitably be seen in relation to "modernity"? There is a risk here of seeing the past only in rela tion to a certain conception of the present's concern with the present, not as an open ing afforded within that present, but as simply leading in a more teleological se nse to its own conventional representation of itself to itself. To think "across" chronologies already depends on some recognition of them; thus the issue of temporali ty and of a history that is not historicist emerges as central. Baroque brings discr epancy and rup ture, not simply harmony: the shattering of what was taken for granted. This is not a question of linear time: baroque is always already contemporary. Fold and scale are already at play and one is enfolded in what one studies: point of view i nvolves self- re flection, a self- aw areness and self-consciousness. A serious engagement with history as a problem should prevent this from being a simply narcissistic matter. The fold in volves the subject within materialist experience, but the matter or mate riality extends beyond the subject. [Helen Hills 7

Helen Hills.

How useful is the term "baroque" in your current research? Do you use it? What do you see as its principal opportunities and traps?

Monika Kaup.

I am currently exploring new approaches to conceptualizing the ba roque and neobaroque as a "networked" aesthetics of complexity. On the one hand, this speaks to the formal characteristics of baroque and neobaroque expression - excess , o rnateness, de-centering proliferation (the anti-minimalist principle of "more is more"). But it is also a continuation of my efforts to resolve the impasse of what Walter Moser calls the "conceptual Babel" of the baroque. 8

My comparative

study Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film focused on finding a way of theorizing the transhistorical and transcultural continuities of the baroque and neobaroque in ways that would neither dismiss the original European baroque nor shortchange the heterogeneity of the "new" baroques that have emerged in its wake. As I argued there, after four centuries of nonlinear development across multiple boundaries among nations, ethnic groups, histor ical pe riods, and disciplines, we have to dispense with the notion of one single baroque, the property of segregated social groups and disciplines. A new "image of thought" (Deleuze) has to be found to account for the multiplicity of baroques accumulated by centuries of nonlinear development: the European baroque (a continental formation and the cultural logic of early modern authoritarianism - absolutism and the Counte r-

Reformation); the New W

orld baroque (the rebellious, de-colonizing offshoots of the European baroque in Europe's colonies in the Americas), and the neobaroque (the recuperation and revival of the seventeenth-century baroque in twentieth- and twen ty-first-century literature, visual art, film, and philosophy). Examples of neobaroque theoretical reconceptualizations of the baroque include: a "timeless, " transhistorical style (Eugenio d'Ors); the medium of rebellious anti-colonial Latin American expres sion (Ángel Guido; Alejo Carpentier; José Lezama Lima); the alternative modernity of the Hispanic world (Irlemar Chiampi and Bolívar Echeverría) - the list goes on.

461 | 2015PERSPECTIVE

Varia In Neobaroque in the Americas, I suggested that - against the grain of familiar schol- arly attempts to "own" the baroque (by the Hispanophone world, or by the discipline of art history) - the baroque and neobaroque today must be recognized as an "open system" or hybrid network, a kind of non-totalizable whole: "the baroque refuses to regard culture as a fixed, 'self-contained system,' the property of discrete, segregated social groups. Rather, the baroque is an 'anti-proprietary expression' that brings to gether seemingly disparate writers and artists; few artistic and representational phe- nomena are so good at bending so many ways as the baroque." 9

Evidence of this is

the existence of neobaroques in Anglo American modernism (T. S.

Eliot and Djuna

Barnes), largely ignored because

of Anglophone culture's ingrained wariness of the baroque. Eliot and Barnes, paralleling the Spanish Generation of '27's recovery of the baroque poet Luis de Góngora, or the Mexican vanguardista Contemporáneos' recu- peration of New World baroque writers such as Sor Juana and Bernardo de Balbuena, contributed to the neobaroque revival and rehabilitation of baroque writers and art ists by reclaiming the English metaphysical poets (Eliot) and Robert Burton and early modern melancholia (Barnes) respectively. Further afield, the baroque-neobaroque network connects, for example, Góngora with the hip-hop baroque, in works by the contemporary African American artist Kehinde Wiley and Cuban American artist Luis Gispert. And the baroque strategy of rebellious stylization and re-creation of the icons of dominant Western culture links eight eenth-century Mexican folk baroque chur ches such as the Church of Santa María Tonantzintla (fig. 3) w ith the rasquache baroquequotesdbs_dbs23.pdfusesText_29

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